About five years ago at my first high school reunion, I took a tour of our new science center. It was pretty ridiculous. The building was equipped with things like a scanning electron microscope and, for reasons that aren't immediately clear to me, cooling towers. On the tour, we saw bio labs with water tables and a tropical marine aquarium, as well as physics labs that have high school-kid-sized merry-go-rounds. When we finished the tour, my buddy The Beav, a filmmaker and tobacco enthusiast, shook his head and said, "Man, if we'd had this science center when I was here, I'd've been a biologist."
Beav was lying, but that doesn't dissuade me from my belief that science education in America could be so much better. I don't think that it's tremendously nerdy to say that science is super dope. Even the simplest science demonstrations we saw on Mr. Wizard stick with us for decades (anyone ever see a hardboiled egg get sucked into a bottle? or celery stalks turn red? That was all much cooler than phonics lessons.)
Bill Bryson recently wrote a book called A Short History of Nearly Everything. It's described as Bryson's "journey into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer." The fiancee and her mom both read it (educators, the lot of them) and seemed to find the intricacies of our collective scientific know-how fascinating. And it is. The stuff we know about our world is crazy cool, and how we came to discover it is equally interesting.
I went into medicine because I wanted to know how the body worked. I'd like to think that the country's interest in medicine is reflected in the Nielson ratings of shows like ER and Grey's Anatomy (as it turns out, the human body likes to have sex with pretty people. Who'd've guessed?). I think that there's a lot of latent interest in the sciences, just waiting to be activated by a compelling curriculum.
The reason I bring this up is because I'm about to give you a hyperlink to a video that I think is awesome. I don't know whether or not it's at all entertaining for those of us without a background in cell biology, but I'd like to believe that stuff like this might make a high school biology class a little more tolerable. Or it may inspire those biology students to be filmmakers.
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2 comments:
man, that is not what it looked like in Innerspace.
To be fair, when Innerspace was made, they didn't know about a lot of this stuff. Most of the video shows an elaborate skeletal system that allows the cell to target vessles to specific sites. When Innerspace was made, we pretty much thought the cell was a mushy bag of enzymes. We also thought Rick Moranis was marketable.
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